Delivering poetry to Stromness

George Mackay Brown, Orkney poet and novelist, died in 1996. A dozen years before his death, I walked around the harbour at Stromness on a wet night and knocked on his door. It had taken me a few days of travelling and a few drinks in the local hotel bar to get to that point.

In the summer of 1984, my relationship with my girlfriend in Edinburgh was finally over. I was working in the bookshop in London and a colleague and I had decided that we would make a trip north and visit Orkney.

Edinburgh was the place to start. I still considered it home and there was sufficient warmth in the recently-ended relationship that I assumed we might be offered somewhere to sleep for a night. And so it turned out.

I visited my ex-girlfriend’s mother — the poet — and she asked she me to take a copy of her new book with us on the road to Orkney. It was for George Mackay Brown, she said. She wrote a short dedication to the great man and handed me the book.

The next day, Roger — my colleague — and I took the train from Waverley and rode slowly north to Thurso. At Thurso we were met by my ex-girlfriend’s father — separated from the poet and now a minister at a kirk near Thurso. He put us up for the night in the manse and in the morning, before driving us to Scrabster for the ferry, took us to the moors and showed us a great ring of standing stones, the name of which I no longer remember and can find no mention of in maps of the area.

The ferry to Stromness is scheduled to take 90 minutes. Shortly after leaving harbour at Scrabster we hit heavy weather. Weather so heavy that the ferry — not a small ship by any means — was tossed in massive waves. We stood at the stern and watched, when the ship dipped over the peak of a wave, as the water showed beyond the bridge. We could see over the bridge to the water into which we were diving. It was a fairground ride without the screams. There may have been screams actually but the wind and the spray lashing into our faces made hearing anything else problematic.

It took us three hours to get to Stromness. Standing in the spray and thrilling to the ride had saved us from seasickness but we had to sit for some time in the hotel bar before feeling normal enough to eat some dinner.

I didn’t want to put off my chore. I was nervous of meeting the great man, of course, but equally I was keen to spend an evening in conversation with such a famous writer. He was also known to be a bit of a drinker, so I imagined a slow descent into drunken companionship as the night progressed. I may even have rehearsed phrases about books and writers I liked.

I made sure I had the copy of Fools & Angels — kept safely dry during the voyage — and headed out the hotel door. With Roger. There was no way he was going to be left behind. As a tyro poet himself, he wasn’t going to miss the chance to sit at the feet of a professional.

So we trudged round the harbour towards the house that the barman assured us was our goal.

It was a typical fisherman’s cottage, with the living quarters in the top half of the building, so the front door was reached up a set of bleached stone steps.

I knocked at the door. It opened almost immediately. The great man stood there. He looked at me and then at Roger.

“Hello, boys,” he said.

I handed the book to him. Mackay Brown took it but didn’t pay it much attention.

I said the poet’s name. “It’s her new book. She asked us to bring you a copy.”

“Oh, aye. Thanks. Good of you.”

Then he stepped back and closed the door.

We stayed another couple of days on Orkney. We saw the Ring of Brodgar and Mae’s Howe and we paid a visit to Kirkwall and its cathedral — St Magnus — where Mackay Brown’s funeral service would be held. We saw nothing again of the man himself and I never discovered if he contacted the poet to thank her for the book.

That trip north to Orkney was, in fact, the last time I saw my ex-girlfriend and I was never to see or speak to her mother or father again; they are now both dead. I left the bookshop the following year and lost touch with my travelling companion Roger.

I have not been back to Orkney, either.